


or curse the darkness

by axilet



Category: Persona 3
Genre: Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Guilt, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 05:41:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2801633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/axilet/pseuds/axilet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shinjiro leaves, he’s <i>done.</i> The bad dreams follow him out the door anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	or curse the darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Khantael](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khantael/gifts).



“You _idiot_ , Shinji,” Akihiko says, frustration flexing his hands into fists--but he’s already punched Shinjiro as hard as he could and that didn’t work, it was never going to--and even Akihiko knows when to give up, when it comes to Shinjiro. They hang at his sides and he looks helpless without a tangible enemy to strike, to defeat. _“_ It was an accident _,_ it wasn’t your fault.”

“I understand,” Mitsuru says, and she does, maybe, more than Akihiko could. “You’re a soldier, not a conscript.” _Unlike me,_ she does not say, and he hears. “In the end, your participation in SEES is entirely voluntary.” She lays her hand on his shoulder then, a hint of regret warming the cool words. “I wish you all the best.”

Akihiko wants to hold on. Mitsuru lets him go. They’ll both be waiting for him to come back, because they’re his friends and stupidly loyal that way, because they _believe_ in him. Shinjiro walks away telling himself he won’t ever come back. He’s _done._ The bad dreams follow him out of the door anyway.

* * *

The clock ticks over to midnight. The Dark Hour falls. The call still comes, Castor rearing and restless for the hunt. In the beginning Shinjiro struggled to resist, driving his nails into his palms, punching the walls and swearing. Drinking--but he gave that one up quickly after waking up with a start to the nasty combination of a hangover and Castor raising holy hell in his head. It’s one of these sleepless nights, behind the station grappling with Castor, that he runs into Takaya and Jin, Persona users like him and not like him. Their other selves have been ripped out of them, violently, and they will forever bear the marks of that violation, in Takaya’s pale eyes bright with madness, and Jin’s constant twitchiness that he can’t quite control; in the Personas that flash into being with a static whine and flicker like a bad signal. Takaya calls him a lost little innocent and laughingly presses the suppressants into his hand. “But not for free, naturally,” he says. “There’s more than one way to repay a debt.”

Jin gives him a card with a number. It’s probably not a good idea to tangle with them, except they can give him what he wants and they won't give him what he doesn't want--namely his friends' doe-eyed looks of pity and understanding, which are much harder to bear than Takaya's contempt and Jin's bored indifference. Shinjiro takes it.

He and Castor are one, the Kirijo scientists had told him, two faces of the same coin. As the waves crash on the shore, first there is Shinjiro, then there is Castor, soaked with the salt and the sea. One ebbed and the other flowed. Until the night that had changed them, _hurt_ them, like a Shadow’s claws raking across flesh and bone that will later not-quite heal into a twisted, permanent scar. In uneasy dreams Shinjiro’s wounds rise to the surface of his skin like bruises, splitting open at the flick of a nail, the glance of the moon, the light from a stranger’s eye. There’s no blood, only the white skull of Castor’s face rising, rising from the dark. Shinjiro sticks his fingers into the shadowed sockets and shoves him down, and when he’s won he wakes up shaking and exhausted with the dubious prize of remaining himself, Shinjiro Aragaki, for another day. Whatever that means now, when he’s strangling his second half, suffocating him slowly, one pill at a time. Times like these, when he’s so weak and sick, when Castor is pounding against the insides of his skull trying to get away from the thing that’s killing him (them), he can almost hear Akihiko’s voice, shouting him at being stupid, for not giving up his life for a grand enough cause.

Shinjiro just lets the words fall through him; easy enough, when he already feels half a ghost anyway.

* * *

The truth is, what they’re doing doesn’t matter.

Shinjiro discovered this the night of the broken house, the broken coffin, the broken boy. (Sometimes he thinks about it, he can’t help it, how he’s an orphan who’s orphaned another angry, lonely kid, and has. to. stop.) Every night when the world turns green they run out into the bloody streets with their SEES armbands and summon their Personas to fight Shadows, and he used to think it meant something--as if there’s an army that’s being whittled down, a score being kept on some cosmic board. Like he and Aki kept score, competing to see who could take down more Shadows in a single Dark Hour, a bit of fun to lighten the heavy responsibility of saving the world. Mitsuru wouldn’t say much in the early days, only that Shadows were humanity’s natural enemies and had to be destroyed. Good enough for a pair of aimless guys with an axe and a pair of fists always craving a fight and a challenge.

Later on, when they've pulled each other's asses out of the (sometimes literal) fire a few times Mitsuru entrusts them with her past, the burden of her family name. It’s around then sarcastic-quotes _Princess_ graduates to something dangerously resembling affectionate-nickname status.

Shinjiro told himself he went along with it mostly to take care of Akihiko, hold him back from rushing headlong into a stupid pointless death--but after a while even he started to get carried away. The power and the rush. The white, ringing emptiness in his head as Castor whirled out in a blur of silver and black and breaking glass, the thundering horse carrying him aloft and out, Castor’s weapon in his hands arcing down heavy with their combined purpose. _I am Castor and Castor is me._ He used to feel such pride. He used to feel--well. As if he really was saving the world.

Then reality caught up, one night when Shinjiro-as-Castor was tearing down the street hunting for a runaway Shadow and forgot that he needed to be careful, that the black coffins always standing around hazily at the edges of his sight contained breakable human bodies. And some kid’s mom ended up paying the price.

Shinjiro lost the count when he left. It’s only a number, and the Shadows don’t _have_ a number, don’t even need to know what numbers are. Kneeling there in the ruins of the house, digging and pushing and pulling at the rubble, mauling his hands into raw red lumps--Shinjiro had sensed _something_ deep inside him shift--as if he’d struck a bell, and laid a finger against it to feel its shivering. As Aki pulled him forcibly away, the kid’s red eyes locked onto his and for one moment they were the same, a mirror and its reflection looking at each other. Shinjiro could see it. He sees it all the time, now, if he cares to look. Not the Shadows, but _the_ Shadow in every human heart. SEES could deploy every Dark Hour until the end of time and nothing would change for good. They couldn’t kill all the Shadows without killing every single damned human being.

And so he walks. Not just because he feels guilty, not just because Castor has become, to him, tainted by the death of Amada-san. He doesn’t run, he never runs despite whatever Aki might insinuate. He didn’t run either when the fire burned down the orphanage, he only saw a fight not worth fighting and stayed out of it. Aki cursed at him that day, screamed and cried, but Shinjiro held him tightly, hug and restraint both, until the fire died down and they could go in to find the plush rabbit that Aki had given his sister, fallen behind the headboard and somehow untouched by the flames.

Shinjiro was always the one who held him back, who picked him up after he fell over running into danger but now there is Mitsuru to do that job, and better. It’s a damned miracle the three of them got together at all, with how different they were, how different they still are. Aki sometimes follows him around, accusing _him_ of being tethered to the past, as if that doesn’t make him the biggest goddamned hypocrite. As if he doesn’t think about Miki, still, every time he looks at that worn old rabbit tenderly, like the world’s most precious treasure.

* * *

One day Aki shows up again as usual, but there’s something different about him, quiet and reflective. Shinjiro waits for him to start the usual spiel, but instead he sits down and reminisces about the past as though he’s gone as silver as his hair. Usually he keeps that shit locked down tighter than a hatch in a storm, as if some self-preserving instinct in him stops his mouth before he can give away too much of what he’s about. Shinjiro interrupts him before they both get dragged too far down memory lane and asks bluntly what exactly is on his mind.

Akihiko says, “We finally know how to get rid of Tartarus and the Dark Hour.”

Shinjiro is surprised, though he does his best to hide it. Well, all those Kirijo scientists had to be on the payroll for _some_ reason other than to prod their child soldiers with medical instruments and utter vaguely portentous statements. But the thought of the Dark Hour ending seems _wrong_ somehow, like imagining the sea without its tides, or humans without their hearts.

Or himself without Castor. “No shit?”

Akihiko nods, but without the gleeful bloodlust Shinjiro expected. This had to be serious. “To be honest,” he says, looking distantly at the wall across, “All I’ve been thinking about lately is getting stronger. But yesterday, someone made me question my reason for fighting.”

Two bombshells in the space of minutes. Shinjiro thinks, with bitter humor, that Akihiko ought to be more careful with where he drops them; certainly not in such close vicinity to an invalid. But of course, Akihiko doesn’t know. Not about the pounding in his chest that comes and goes like a herd of crazed, drunken horses, the pills in his pocket, Castor’s attacks. Shinjiro takes advantage of Akihiko’s distraction to rub the hot, tight skin about his forehead and inhale a lungful of the smoky air.

“Shinji?”

Akihiko is frowning at him. With an effort Shinjiro focuses on him and scoffs at the uncharacteristic uncertainty implied by Akihiko’s words. “Your reason for fighting? That’s different for every person. But if you think you don’t have a good one, or never did…” He smirks, knowing it will piss Aki off. “You can always quit, like I did.”

Akihiko scowls, predictably. “I’m not like you...man, I can’t believe _I’m_ the one getting lectured here.”

It was meant to be good enough advice, not a lecture, but Shinjiro stays silent. No need to start the old arguments all over again. Aki must feel the same way, because he stands up and stretches. “Well, see ya around.”

Shinjiro eyes the closing door and wonders if Akihiko really has changed after all. He doesn’t follow.

* * *

He still doesn’t, the full moon after. He doesn’t lie to Takaya and Jin when they press him about his true allegiances. He genuinely believes any plans to stop the Dark Hour are a load of bunk. Old Man Kirijo might have pulled it out of the ass-crack of the world twenty years ago, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to go quietly back in. Beating up twelve powerful Shadows every full moon...he can see why Akihiko likes that plan. The more he likes it, the more doubts Shinjiro has.

In the unlikely event Akihiko is right, Mitsuru has surpassed herself in gathering together another ragtag team of do-gooder misfits. It’s not like they’re in desperate need of a failed, dying ex-Persona user. Only Akihiko wants him back. Akihiko and the incurable complex that wants to save everyone, even if it’s just from themselves.

But then Akihiko ambushes him with the news that Ken Amada is joining the team. One of these days he’s going to kill Shinjiro before a rescue can actually happen. Shinjiro forcibly draws breath into his aching lungs and glares. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Akihiko patiently explains. Shinjiro seethes, internally. The smug bastard is enjoying this. He thinks he’s finally found the perfect way to entice Shinjiro back to SEES.

The hell of the thing is, he’s right. Just not for the reasons he imagines. “Then count me in,” Shinjiro says, and pointedly turns away when Akihiko beams like the rising sun.

Shinjiro and the son of the woman he killed on the same side. It’s like a bad joke, the kind that God occasionally plays on the helpless world. The kind that creates heroes and monsters. But if Miki represents the one Akihiko couldn’t save, then Ken Amada is the one Shinjiro _can_ save. Even if _his_ reason for fighting is exactly what Shinjiro suspects. There's more than one way to pay off a debt, after all.

He takes the briefcase from Akihiko, and despite himself savors the weight and heft of the Evoker inside, in so many ways more familiar to him than his own face. Castor stirs, slow and lethargic. A breath stirring a feather, or faint mist on a mirror. _I’m sorry,_ Shinjiro allows himself to say, the first time he’s offered that apology to anyone but Amada-san. _I’m sorry._

He opens his eyes to Akihiko looking at him, _really_ looking; the impulsive happiness faded to a cautious hope. Akihiko leans slightly forward, one arm bent at his side, his hand reaching out. As though ready to restrain Shinjiro, should he suddenly change his mind again and start running away. “Thank you,” he says softly. Shinjiro grunts.

“Is my room still vacant?” he asks, and of course it is. _Idiots,_ he thinks, with a mixture of fond exasperation and guilt. Two years and their belief in him hasn’t wavered, and he’s going to repay that by letting them down one more time. Under the layers of cloth and skin his heart thrums like the wings of a trapped bird, a constant reminder of his betrayal.

“Let’s go,” Akihiko says, tugging at him. “Mitsuru’s waiting for us.”

Shinjiro goes back, leaving the bad dreams behind. Ken Amada and the end of their story are waiting for him. At last, he feels a peculiar kind of peace.

_end._

**Author's Note:**

> Note that most of the dialogue from the last two scenes were lifted directly from the game.
> 
> This was a bit of headcanon-y interpretation of Shinjiro's character and motivations, I hope it wasn't too far off base. It's been a while since I last played P3.


End file.
